The Republic of Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán began his speech at Tusványos as an opposition politician by praising the event as a refuge from explanation.

Péter Magyar greets Viktor Orbán during a European Parliament session in Strasbourg, October 9, 2024. Photo: © European Union 2024 / Alain Rolland

“There must be a place where things that are indisputable to all of us do not need to be explained,” he said. Everyone present spoke the same language, “politically, historically and culturally.”

Tusványos supplied him exactly that, a setting built on familiar rituals and a loyal audience where sympathetic moderators and a politically attuned community were already prepared to receive his assumptions as national truths.

Orbán had come to explain his defeat without examining it.

The annual gathering in Băile Tușnad, a Romanian town in Transylvania’s Hungarian heartland, began in 1990 as a forum for dialogue between Hungarian and Romanian politicians, students and intellectuals. Under Orbán, it became an elaborately protected stage for his annual interpretation of Hungary and the world. Serious disagreement gradually disappeared from the programme. The leader explained history, and the audience routinely applauded.

From the opposition, he delivered the same sermon.

On April 13, Orbán said, Hungarians had awakened to “a new reality,” something resembling “a bad joke or a tasteless prank.” His country had become difficult to recognise.

The election result was brutally unambiguous. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a clear majority of the vote and a commanding parliamentary majority, a scale of victory that led to the political collapse of the old order. Fidesz was reduced to a distant second, with millions of voters effectively delivering a historic repudiation of Orbán’s system.

Hungary had judged Orbán.

That judgment was the one fact he could not absorb in today’s speech.

“By this, dear friends, they have abolished democracy,” Orbán said, referring to constitutional changes that imposed a retrospective 12-year limit on members of Parliament and could prevent him and other senior Fidesz figures from standing again.

“If the people do not decide whom they vote for, but those in power decide whom they may vote for, then democracy is finished.”

The new government’s constitutional conduct deserves serious scrutiny. Human Rights Watch has warned that the rushed changes, including the removal of President Tamás Sulyok and the president of the Constitutional Court, lacked proper safeguards and risked damaging efforts to restore the rule of law.

The warning is serious, but Orbán’s performance was still revolting.

From 2010 to 2026, his governments used their parliamentary majority to rewrite the constitution, redraw electoral rules, reshape constituencies, and steadily bring public broadcasting under control while steering state advertising towards friendly media. Loyalists were given institutional mandates that outlasted elections themselves. Public resources and party campaigning became so intertwined that the line between state and party disappeared.

Not surprisingly, international observers stated that the 2022 election was not a fair contest, highlighting the close overlap between the government and Fidesz campaign organisation. The European Commission later cautioned that media pluralism remained at risk, citing weak safeguards surrounding state advertising, the independence of the media authority, and the editorial independence of public service broadcasters. Orbán demanded that Hungarians accept this as democracy because he kept winning.

The restrictions have now reached his own career, and his commitment to procedural restraint began there.

Under Fidesz, the ballot survived inside a political environment excavated, tilted and fenced by the governing party. Orbán treated the supermajorities produced by that system as sacred expressions of the popular will. Now, another parliamentary majority began using constitutional power against him, and democracy was immediately pronounced dead.

He continued:

“With a personalised, retroactive constitutional amendment, they removed the president of the republic, the president of the Constitutional Court and the chief prosecutor, and with this they abolished the rule of law as well.”

Then the warning appeared.

“This has no significance yet, but it will when we restore the rule of law. Then it will have serious significance.”

The threat was barely concealed. Orbán accused the government of weaponising the law against political opponents, then promised future consequences for those responsible.

His defence of impartial justice came with a list of future defendants.

The phrase “when we restore the rule of law” exposed the deeper arrogance. Orbán still spoke as the authorised custodian of Hungary’s constitutional order. A government elected by a decisive majority could be treated as an illegitimate occupation; meanwhile, its own return would constitute restoration by definition.

Soon, the dictators appeared.

Hungary had become “the new Venezuela, only without the oil wealth.” The new agency created to investigate and recover misused state assets recalled the work of “the communists and Hitler.”

“We know how that ended,” Orbán said.

Venezuela. Communism. Hitler. Each reference piled on the melodrama like a collapsing stack of emergency sirens, attempting to increase emotional pressure while reducing the burden of proof to near zero.

Orbán described party-controlled prosecutors, police raids against political opponents, the intimidation of dissenters, the removal of officials and an atmosphere in which nobody could feel safe. (I guess he has expert insider knowledge of these subjects.)

For us Hungarians who had spent years living under his government, the anger came from recognition: the very man who had spent a decade assembling the order of power was now performing outrage at the sound of it working exactly as it was designed to.

Fidesz watched prosecutors show little interest in cases involving influential Fidesz figures, while public broadcasting gradually became government broadcasting, and state institutions were incorporated into political campaigning. Independent media faced ongoing economic pressure, and public funds were efficiently directed towards families and businesses connected to the ruling elite.

Orbán dismissed these concerns as foreign attacks on Hungary, a familiar framing that had long allowed him to convert domestic criticism into external hostility.

After losing power, he repeated the indictment and placed himself at its centre, as though the system he had built to deflect scrutiny had suddenly been turned against him.

The speech became a confession spoken through accusation, its logic intact but inverted, with every charge revealing more about its author than its target.

Orbán then produced an especially audacious description of modern propaganda.

“Today there is no censorship,” he said. “Reality is simply shouted down.”

He delivered this diagnosis after sixteen years of relentless government campaigning across public television, billboards, social media, and a media empire maintained through state advertising. His government spent vast public resources repeatedly broadcasting political messages on every available surface. Now Orbán was describing that information system as a weapon in someone else’s hands.

The comparison with Venezuela operated similarly, merging investigations, arrests, searches, personnel changes, and parliamentary measures into a single narrative of authoritarian persecution where individual cases became abstract, evidence disappeared from view, procedures lost importance, and any action against a former Fidesz official could be viewed as proof that the entire system was corrupt.

As it goes, this is an exceptionally useful doctrine for a party facing accountability.

An investigated Fidesz politician is recast as a victim; the victim is elevated into a martyr; the martyr is transfigured into a prospective national leader.

During the questions after his speech, Orbán described former counterterrorism chief János Hajdu and former minister Balázs Hankó as men being metamorphosed into heroes through their treatment by the authorities.

The transformation does not require acquittal; investigation itself confers honour, legal jeopardy proves loyalty, and loyalty serves as a qualification for power.

Every allegation can thus be seen as persecution. Every arrest displays courage. Every prosecution reinforces the legend.

Eventually, Orbán acknowledged that Fidesz should examine why it lost.

“We must understand the voters’ decision,” he said. “After a defeat, one must always look at the world self-critically.”

This heightened sense of self-reflection lasted for 9 seconds.

“Unfortunately, we have little time left for this, because freedom is now in danger in Hungary. Therefore, instead of an opposition politics built on self-criticism, we must now switch to a politics of resistance.”

Orbán’s argument is based on the assumption that Hungarians have the memory span of goldfish. He acknowledged the need to listen to voters but then immediately suspended it by declaring an emergency. He often liked to use the power to declare an emergency as a form of political manoeuvring.

Fidesz could now escape the humiliating work of asking why so many Hungarians rejected it, leaving corruption unexamined and the failures of healthcare and education untouched. Inflation, dependence on Russia, institutional decay and the enrichment of politically connected families would be folded into the language of national resistance.

The voters had spoken. Orbán turned their verdict into a siren and called it a crisis.

He eventually set out four tasks for Fidesz, which were to speak against lies, defend the previous sixteen years, stand by its members and resist authoritarianism.

None required the party to reconsider its conduct, and none engaged with the condition of public services, corruption, economic policy, or the collapse of its support among younger voters. The supposed strategic direction announced at Tusványos amounted instead to a posture of self-defence: preserving the record, protecting its own ranks, and waiting for the new government to fail.

Resistance became the way to postpone the explanation permanently.

For too long, every failure was shifted externally until no one in Hungary was ever responsible.

Now, electoral defeat has joined the conspiracy.

Even Orbán’s apology became an exercise in evasion.

“We must admit to you, our own voters, that the prime minister who is now turning the country upside down came from our ranks,” he said. “If there is anything for which I must apologise to you, it is this. He came from among us.”

Four terms in government produced one imaginable cause for apology: Péter Magyar. Bravo.

There was no apology for the public wealth transferred into private hands. No apology for hospitals where families have been expected to supply basic necessities. No apology for teachers subjected to years of centralisation and neglect. No apology for institutions hollowed out and filled with loyalists. No apology for deepening Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy while presenting that dependence as sovereignty. Hungarians must not forget: political memory is short, but we must not forget what Orbán did to our country.

Orbán apologised for allowing the man who defeated him to exist.

Magyar became partly credible because he had witnessed the Fidesz world from within. He understood its privileges, private bargains and cultivated distance between public morality and private conduct. Orbán presented that knowledge as betrayal, whereas millions of voters treated it as testimony.

Then Orbán reached for a psychiatric insinuation.

“So Hungary has now received a rampage in place of sober, balanced leadership,” he said. “I used to have a good laugh at the Americans whenever I read that, over there, the president is subjected to a psychological fitness examination before taking office. But looking at Hungary now, I am no longer laughing. Those Americans must know something after all.”

They do not. This is the typical Trumpian style of feigned institutional seriousness, the same kind of nonsense his hero Trump engages in, a man who could barely be trusted to pass a fork across a table without creating a disaster, let alone survive a psychological fitness test.

Orbán invented an American safeguard to give institutional weight to a personal smear. Generational thinking.

His insinuation was obvious: Péter Magyar might be mentally unfit for office, Fidesz and Orbán say, even as Tisza’s support continues to rise to its highest level yet.

Minutes earlier, Orbán had condemned the laws that would exclude him from future elections. He then invoked an imaginary system in which an opponent’s fitness for office could depend upon a psychological assessment.

Orbán demanded dignity and due process for himself; meanwhile, his opponent was subjected to psychiatric insinuation.

Thus, the former prime minister now speaks of Hungary’s elected leader as a rampaging figure whose mental fitness he questions, calling him an aberration produced by a deceived electorate.

That same contempt extends to those voters.

“Young people were made to believe that everything called European, and everything from Brussels, is good,” Orbán said. Their inexperience had made them easy to deceive.

“We saw this before 2010, but every joke is new to a newborn.”

Young Hungarians have known little else but the Orbán system. It formed the backdrop of their schooling, their encounters with hospitals, their first wages, and the slow, insistent hum of propaganda that accompanied all of it. They watched, almost without being told, as certain families rose with a quiet inevitability, their fortunes thickening in step with political proximity. And then came the departures: friends slipping away one by one, first as a plan, then as a pattern, until leaving Hungary itself became a kind of shared biography.

Orbán heard their verdict and diagnosed it as immaturity.

Their rejection became a product of innocence, foreign seduction and attraction to novelty, an innocence he seeks for that very purpose. His own government escaped examination once again.

This was the arrogance that lay beneath the speech. Orbán treated support for him as though it were proof of political understanding, as if assent itself conferred comprehension. Opposition, by contrast, became a deviation that required explanation, a fault in perception rather than a legitimate judgement.

He applied the same reasoning to the entire election.

“There would really be nothing for us to debate about the twelve years between 2010 and 2022,” Orbán said, because voters had repeatedly given Fidesz a two-thirds parliamentary majority. “There was only a problem with the final four years, to which they said no. They did not say no to sixteen years.”

Fidesz never won two-thirds of the national vote. Its parliamentary supermajorities came through an electoral system written under Fidesz and repeatedly criticised for advantages that favoured the governing coalition. Even in the 2026 election that removed Orbán, international observers found no level playing field and reported systemic advantages that blurred the boundary between state and party.

Orbán transformed seats into absolution.

Every victory sanctified the entire preceding record. The defeat could then be confined to the final term, safely separated from everything that had produced it.

His interpretation grants voters authority only when their judgment confirms his own.

Even after losing, Orbán reserves the right to tell Hungarians what their vote meant.

His treatment of younger voters became still more revealing when he admitted that they see Fidesz as “old, tired and boring.”

A serious political response would have confronted that judgment. Instead, Orbán delivered a strategy based on national deterioration. Hard times, he predicted, would make those qualities attractive again.

Fidesz waits for pain to do what persuasion no longer can. It counts on failure to soften resistance, on disorder abroad to make exhaustion feel like wisdom, on stagnation to pass for safety when everything else has lost its name.

Orbán later said the additional voters Fidesz needed would be delivered by “the political waves created by reality.”

“Economic troubles and economic difficulties,” he clarified.

The former prime minister is waiting for Hungary to suffer its way back to him.

He even supplied a date, drawing on one of the most traumatic episodes in modern Hungarian history. The Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed after 133 days in 1919, and Orbán used that number as a symbolic countdown.

“When the 133 days have passed, and the 134th arrives, watch carefully: resistance will grow day by day, and the camp of freedom will grow.”

The 134th day is a wish disguised as prophecy. It gives supporters a deadline for the collapse they have been instructed to expect. Every autumn price rise, bureaucratic error or public dispute can be presented as fulfilment.

The strategy contains no persuasive new programme; it relies on events punishing voters until they repent.

Orbán’s organisational answer followed the same logic. Fidesz, he said, must serve the “national resistance.”

“Fidesz must now operate as a service centre, an incubator and, if you like, a nursery,” he said. “Fidesz must help the groups and organisations of freedom-loving people.”

Even in opposition, Orbán cannot imagine Fidesz as an ordinary political party.

It remains the organisation that defines the nation, selects its leaders, nurtures its communities and determines which governments possess legitimacy. The party has lost office, but Orbán’s sense of ownership remains intact.

In his worldview, Hungary belongs to Fidesz. Other governments occupy it.

The promise of future “redress” completed the warning.

Once democracy had been restored, Orbán said, “the victims and those who have suffered losses will receive full redress.”

The resistance is already keeping names.

Officials investigating former Fidesz figures have been put on notice. Loyalists are promised restoration; suspects are told they may yet be recast as victims in a future dispensation.

Orbán fears the legal system now moving against his circle, and already imagines the one he might one day turn upon its investigators.

The anger this speech provokes lies in its demand that Hungarians unlearn their own experience.

They are asked to hear the architect of captured institutions denounce capture itself, to watch a man who rewrote the rules of competition declare democracy dead the moment those rules cease to serve him.

Corruption inquiries become a dictatorship. Electoral defeat becomes national disfigurement. Millions of voters are reduced to naïveté, as if they had mistaken their own judgment.

Orbán offers himself absolution and disperses blame outward.

Defeat becomes persecution. Accountability becomes revenge. The electorate is recast as a bewildered audience in a history he still claims to author.

He concedes he no longer governs, but refuses the verdict that removed him.

His democracy is now stripped to its essence: a political order that returns Viktor Orbán to power. Anything else becomes, by definition, betrayal, madness, or tyranny.

Viktor Orbán has finally discovered democracy.

He found it within the narrowing perimeter of his own threatened authority.

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Source: Viktor Orbán’s Tusványos speech and question session, July 25, 2026; Telex, National Election Office; OSCE/ODIHR; the European Commission; Human Rights Watch; US National Archives and USAGov.